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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

US Advertising feature: Deep impact

By Roshan McArthur

When he died in 1997, Jacques Cousteau had explored the oceans for more than half a century. In the process, he inspired everyone from singer John Denver to SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenberg. He also encouraged generations of marine biologists to take to the seas.

In the past decade, however, marine science has gone through a dramatic evolution, taking researchers out of tide pools and putting them at the center of some of the most important issues of the day – from earthquake prediction to preserving fish populations and forecasting climate change.

Deidre Sullivan, director and principal investigator for the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center in Monterey, California, points to four trends in marine science that have been pivotal. The first, computer processing power, has given rise to smarter, faster and less-expensive equipment. The second, microelectronics, has made equipment smaller and more durable. Biotechnology, the third development, helps with sequencing and understanding evolution and populations. Finally, remote sensing allows scientists to study the atmosphere, the ocean and the sea floor without being in direct contact with them.

“Each of those trends is advancing rapidly,” Sullivan says, “but it’s the intersection of all four that is transforming how science is being done.”

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Here, we look at several areas in which marine science is having an impact not only on the oceans, but on the planet as a whole.

Mapping the oceans

The Census of Marine Life, a global initiative to assess the diversity, distribution and abundance of ocean life, will reach the end of its 10-year run in October. In that time, it will have gathered an astonishing amount of data.

Ron O’Dor, its senior scientist, says&colon; “The single most important thing from the perspective of long-term sampling has been the recognition of cheap, efficient technology. We’ve tested a lot of different products, we know what works and we know how to do it quickly and efficiently.”

Alongside the Census, scientists at Guelph University in Ontario and the Smithsonian Institute developed a system for DNA barcoding called the Barcode of Life. “People used to go out with a net and collect stuff,” says O’Dor, “and two years later somebody had identified it all, which really isn’t the best way to image an entire ocean.” The Barcode, on the other hand, now allows scientists to document samples in hours.

O’Dor is also part of the Ocean Tracking Network at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which puts acoustic and satellite tags on animals to find out where they travel and where they thrive.

All of this information can be used to manage commercial fishing. “The jobs of the future are not going to be guys out wandering around in boats burning up fuel,” he says. “It’s going to be guys sitting at computers providing useful advice to fishers on how to catch fish with the least amount of fuel. And if the fishermen want to know where they can catch the fish, they also have to let us tell them when they need to stop.”

O’Dor believes that data management is now a crucial skill for a marine scientist. “It’s important that everyone has some baseline computer technology as part of their education,” he says. “We’re going to have terabytes of data to manage.”

Predicting disaster

It is, he admits, largely uncharted territory. “We know the shape of Venus better than we know the shape of our own seafloor,” he says. “When we go to sea, we are almost certain that we are doing something nobody has done before.

“This year, we’re looking at earthquake faults in the Bay of Algiers. A major earthquake happened there a few hundred years ago, but people are complacent about it, so their guard is down. There are major faults under the ocean fairly close to the coastline, and if those faults are connected to the land fault, then an earthquake in the capital city, Algiers, will be much greater than people have estimated.”

Lin and his colleagues have developed a computer model to show how stress is transferred between sections of a fault every time an earthquake happens. The recent earthquake in Haiti occurred on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone, which is 500km long, but only one-tenth of the fault ruptured.

“We’ve calculated that stress in sections to the east and west has greatly increased [in that fault],” says Lin, “so Haiti will have additional major earthquakes. We do not have the science to calculate when an earthquake will happen, but my feeling is that it will be tens of years, not 200.”

The climate change conundrum

Taking research and applying it to the world’s biggest problems is part and parcel of marine science today, says Mike Orbach, professor of the practice of marine affairs and policy at Duke Marine Lab, North Carolina. And, he says, it’s as much about social science as it is about natural science. “If your goal is conservation, you’re dealing with human behavior as much as you are with fish behavior – probably more,” he says.

One of the major effects of climate change, for example, will be a sea level rise of between one and two meters within the next century.

“That is something that we cannot mitigate our way out of,” Orbach explains. “What we can do, however, is figure out how to adapt. Through radar and satellite imagery, we know which areas are going to be under water 100 years from now. Many of those areas have cities in them, billions of people and lots of natural infrastructure such as mangrove swamps, all of which will be submerged.

“So we have to start planning for where the people, roads and buildings are going to move to,” he continues. “We’ll defend some places, probably Manhattan Island and parts of LA, but we’re also going to retreat from a lot of them due to the cost and the practical difficulties. So where are we going to go? Where is our natural infrastructure going to go?”

“We need to put more emphasis on the integrative sciences rather than the reductionist sciences,” says Mel Briscoe, director of research and education at the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. “If we don’t train students in the sense of social responsibility, in the impact of their science and in the ability to communicate their passions and their fears, then we’ll get lots of people who are having fun dissecting frogs – but someday the frogs won’t be there anymore.”